CC in Education
Why Creative Commons licenses for education?
The Internet and technology have transformed how people learn. Educational resources are no longer static and scarce, but digital and freely accessible. Teachers and learners everywhere can access world-class materials and participate in their creation and evolution. The potential impact of digitally enabled education is huge, but is also hindered by current legal and technical restrictions. Creative Commons provides the tools necessary to overcome these restrictions, opening up educational resources so that they are not only accessible, but adaptable, interoperable, and discoverable — helping to realize the full benefits of digitally enabled education. Read more in Creative Commons and Open Educational Resources (OER).
Who uses CC in education?
When Creative Commons launched its licenses in 2002, leaders in the open education space such as MIT OpenCourseWare recognized it as the legal and technical standard for OER. Like computers and the internet, CC licenses are part of the infrastructure that enables collaboration in the digital medium. CC licensed resources are legally and technically interoperable on a global scale, enabling teachers and learners everywhere to work together. A growing number of educational institutions and communities around the world, such as those featured below, use Creative Commons licenses.
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Open Courseware
MIT OpenCourseWare has been releasing its materials under a CC BY-NC-SA license since 2004. Today, MIT OCW has 2000 courses available freely and openly online for anyone, anywhere to adapt, translate, and redistribute. MIT OCW have been translated into at least 10 languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French, German, Vietnamese, and Ukrainian. See Two MIT OCW Courses Reach Million Visit Milestone.” The OpenCourseWare concept has now spread to hundreds of universities worldwide.
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Connexions
Connexions is a repository and collaborative platform of educational materials that breaks down larger collections, such as textbooks and courses, into basic building blocks known as modules. Each module has a corresponding web page, so educators can mix and match pages to create custom collections. All modules and collections are licensed CC BY so can they be continually edited, translated, and adapted. Collaborative Statistics is one open textbook model whose evolution is enabled by CC BY.
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CK-12 Foundation
The CK-12 Foundation addresses the growing costs of textbooks and the closed, outdated medium in which they are available. Focusing specifically on textbooks for K-12 schools, the nonprofit works with states and institutions to build web-based, collaborative “flexbooks” that are free to use and adapt via CC BY-NC-SA. The CK-12 Foundation is a major contributor to the California Free Digital Textbooks Initiative, a CA initiative that aligns open textbooks to state standards.
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Bloomsbury Academic
Bloomsbury Academic is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, publisher of the Harry Potter series. Bloomsbury Academic publishes “world-class research-based books across the humanities and social sciences, with a strong commitment to the traditional virtues of scholarly publishing, including rigorous peer-review.” Bloomsbury Academic works with its authors to use CC licenses, and has several publications available via CC BY-NC, including Lawrence Lessig’s Remix.
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Flat World Knowledge
Flat World Knowledge is a commercial textbook publisher that incorporates CC licenses into its business model. Co-founded by the Director of Marketing for Prentice Hall Business Publishing, FWK makes higher education textbooks freely available via CC BY-NC-SA, allowing professors and students to adapt them to individual courses, while offering print and supplementary materials at low costs.
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Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU)
P2PU is a grassroots education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU provides the social environment necessary to learning for free anywhere at anytime. P2PU is teaching and learning by peers for peers and it is run and governed by volunteers. It builds on educational content that is free from copyright restrictions or licensed under Creative Commons licenses. All of its peer produced content is available under CC BY-SA.
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Curriki
Curriki is known as the “next generation wiki” for K-12 education; it is an online community and wiki platform for teachers, learners, and education experts to share, reuse, and remix quality curricula. Teachers can find and develop resources, share lesson plans, and collaborate on courses with others in their school or around the world. All content is available under CC BY.
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Khan Academy
The Khan Academy offers over 1600 instructional videos covering everything from basic algebra to advanced chemistry, biology, and even the current day banking crisis. While working at an investment fund, Salman Khan started tutoring his younger cousins in his spare time by creating and posting videos to YouTube. As the videos grew in popularity, the Khan Academy was born. 200,000+ students use the site each month, and all videos are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA, with some already translated into Spanish, Tamil, and other languages.
To find more CC-licensed educational materials, see our list OER directories and search engines, including our own prototype, DiscoverEd.
News
Follow what’s new in the world of Creative Commons and education via the OER section of the Creative Commons blog.
In depth
To read more about OER, see the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a strong supporter of the movement, at www.hewlett.org/oer, the UNESCO OER site, WikiEducator, and our list of resources about OER.
Visit the OER portal on the Creative Commons Wiki for many additional resources about Creative Commons and education and to share your own knowledge about OER.
